I am trying to upgrade radios at our club which is an inland reservoir of about 70 acres

The current ones are difficult to hear over wind and engine noise.

They are for communication between S.I. or O.O.D. and safety boat

Preferably they would be waterproof and be able to be recharged without having to get the batteries out

Does anyone know a model they can recommend?

Roy

I would recommend you invest in some waterproof ICOM VHF radios, such as the IC M1 Euro radio. Very tough and fully waterproof. Whilst a high outlay they do have rechargable batteries and will  pay for themselves over a few years.

Ofcom have changed the licence status. You no longer need an annual licence for these, you simply apply for the 2no licences and these are for life, all for about £20 - £30 fee.

The only issue is that your operators should all be VHF trained.

The alternative is that you go with a UHF system. This takes you away from the VHF Operator training, but i have yet to find a decent set of UHF radios which will hold out as well as VHF.

If you do opt for a VHF solution, check out www.anchortraining.co.uk they will do you on site VHF radio courses for a good fee. Talk to Ben..

Hope this all helps.

Stuart Scrimgeour (PBT)

I drive boats for a living so I've used many different types of portable radios and would agree that VHF is the most practical solution.  However on the oil platform we are presently working we use both UHF and VHF Motorola sets in both cases and these are very reliable and have exceptional performance nd certainly will hold out as well as any VHF i've come across.

I'm presently diving an Ocean Dynamics Ribworker 40 with a 450 hp Caterpilar and Hamilton jet, so shes a noisy girl and both sets work fine and are more than audible.  We also use Standard Horizon portable VHF which I think are far more rugged than Icom's.  Very reasonable priced as well I think you can pick em up from Nautiquipe in the west midlands for about £100 including recharger and a spare dry cell battery pack if you need it.  Nicad charge sems to last for around 2 working days.

Whatever portable VHF's you buy avoid cheap makes such as Selva, atlantic and XM.  which usaualy sell for betwen 50 and 70

this is the model I am refering to n.b I am not advising you to buy from America as the bands are slihtly different but this a decent write up.  I use these in my Training School with no problems for over two years.

http://shop.sailnet.com/product_info.php/products_id/28658  

--Last edited by rogue wave on 2008-08-25 03:03:15 --